Evergreen High School baseball coach Steve Jones preaches the name on the front of the jersey — Cougars — more so than the one on the back.

In his words, there are no individual stars, and it’s definitely not about any single player. His Cougars showed that and more in a three-game spring break trip to Phoenix, winning two of three games to return to Colorado with a 4-1 record.

LAKEWOOD — Camille Morales called the 4x1,600-meter run a “good mental workout.” It is that indeed. It’s also a grind.

The unique run — four consecutive runners tackling the track at Jeffco Stadium four times around — is not one of the more common events on the track and field slate. As a matter of fact, March 18 will probably be the only time this season that Morales, Caitlin Schmitt, Sydney Grob and Carolyn Graven will run it. But they ran it faster than anyone else at the 4A Jeffco League Relays.

BASEBALLCougars score a pair of road wins to open the 2015 seasonPARKER — Evergreen High has opened the Steve Jones era on a good note, winning its first two games of the 2015 season. The Cougars pounded out a 17-8 road win at Ponderosa on March 19.

Evergreen opened the season with a 2-1 win in 10 innings over Erie three days earlier.

Dylan Schmoker had two of the Cougars’ five hits in the win over Erie. Alec Moens, who had one of the other three hits, picked up the win.

It wasn’t for a lack of effort, but it took a while — quite a while — for the Evergreen Lady Cougars to find a rhythm in their home opener March 14 against Pueblo Centennial. However, once they did, there was little the visiting Lady Bulldogs could do to stop them at Evergreen High School.

Second-half goals from Sofia Weiner and Jahna Pusedu in the final 17 minutes erased a scoreless tie as Evergreen improved to 3-0 on the young season with a 2-0 victory.

WHEAT RIDGE — First-year Evergreen High boys swimming coach Marc Rios has taken a hands-off approach early on in the 2015 season. He’s gone as far as to let the Cougars choose which events they want to swim in. That was the case in Evergreen’s tri-meet at Wheat Ridge Rec Center on March 13 along with the host Farmers and Ralston Valley, in which the Cougars placed second with 97 points.

Steve Jones has to feel as if he has stepped into a golden situation when he came on board as Evergreen’s baseball coach last fall. The former EHS assistant coach, who has been proceeded in recent years by long-time coach Terry Hensley, Matt Erholtz, Tim Wulf and Dale Hutchings, hopes to bring a sense of stability to a program that is loaded with upperclassmen in 2015.

“I am a beneficiary of that,” Jones said of his veteran roster. “Still the guys have to go out and play hard and play smart.”